In one of his first major actions as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt has blocked a scheduled ban of the use of a pesticide that evidence has shown causes developmental damage to children’s brains.

Pruitt vetoed the ban – which had been a decade in the making after petitions from the Natural Resources Defence Council and Pesticide Action Network started back in 2007 – at the “eleventh hour” after the EPA itself proposed the ban based on its own scientific findings in 2015. The EPA was under court order to issue a final rule by the end of March this year.

After the EPA proposed the ban in October 2015, Croplife America, the United States’ biggest pesticide lobbying group, petitioned the EPA to block the ban. That Pruitt has come down on the side of pro-pesticide groups has incurred, if not surprise, then a scathing response from those seeking the ban.

“The Trump EPA’s denial of the NRDC and Pesticide Action Network 2007 petition to ban chlorpyrifos contradicts the EPA’s own analysis from November 2016 (just five months ago!) that found widespread risk to children from residues of the pesticide on food, in drinking water, and in the air in agricultural communities,” the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) said in a statement on Wednesday, after the EPA’s announcement. “Up until last night, the EPA explained that because of these risks a ban was needed to protect children’s health.”